At something after seven o'clock that night Willy Cameron and Pink
Denslow reached that point on the Mayville Road which had been
designated by the storekeeper, Cusick. They left the car there,
hidden in a grove, and struck off across country to the west. Willy
Cameron had been thoughtful for some time, and as they climbed a
low hill, going with extreme caution, he said:

"Good citizen," said Pink, with promptness. "You've got to remember,
Cameron, that a lot of these fellows are better Americans than we
are. They're like religious converts, stronger than the ones born
in the fold. They're Americans because they want to be. Anyhow,
you ought to be strong for him, Cameron. He said to tell you, but
no one else."

"I'll tell you how strong I am for him later," Willy Cameron said,
grimly. "Just at this minute I'm waiting to be shown."

They advanced with infinite caution, for the evening was still light.
Going slowly, it was well after eight and fairly dark before they
came within sight of the farm buildings in the valley below. Long
unpainted, they were barely discernable in the shadows of the hills.
The land around had been carefully cleared, and both men were
dismayed at the difficulty of access without being seen.

"Doesn't look very good, does it?" Pink observed. "I will say this,
for seclusion and keeping away unwanted visitors, it has it all
over any dug-out I ever saw in France."

"Plain scare on my part, probably. I don't so much mind this little
excursion, Pink, as I hate the idea that a certain gentleman named
Cusick may have a chance to come to our funerals and laugh himself
to death."

When real darkness had fallen, they had reached the lower fringe
of the woods. Pink had the fault of the city dweller, however, of
being unable to step lightly in the dark, and their progress had
been less silent than it should have been. In spite of his handicap,
Willy Cameron made his way with the instinctive knowledge of the
country bred boy, treading like a cat.

"Pretty poor," Pink said in a discouraged whisper, after a twig had
burst under his foot with a report like the shot of a pistol. "You
travel like a spook, while I - "

"Listen, Pink. I'm going in alone to look around. Stop muttering
and listen to me. It's poor strategy not to have a reserve
somewhere, isn't it?"

"I'm a poor prune at the best," Pink said stubbornly, "but I am not
going to let you go into that place alone. You can rave all you
want."

"Very well. Then we'll both stay here. You are about as quiet as
a horse going through a corn patch."

"Better meet at the machine," he decided, after a glance at the sky.
"In half an hour you won't be able to see your hand in front of you.
Wait here for a half-hour or so, and then start back, and for
heaven's sake don't shoot at anything you see moving. As a matter
of fact, I might as well have your revolver. I won't need it, but
it may avoid any accidental shooting by a youth I both love and
admire!"

"Come in and welcome," said Willy Cameron, and Pink knew he was
smiling.

He took the revolver and slipped away into the darkness, leaving
Pink both melancholy and disturbed. Unaccustomed to night in the
woods, he found his nerves twitching at every sound. In the war
there had been a definite enemy, definitely placed. Even when
he had gone into that vile strip between the trenches, there had
been a general direction for the inimical. Here -

Not a sound came from the farm buildings. Willy Cameron's progress,
too, was noiseless. With no way to tell the lapse of time, and
gauging it by his war experience, when an hour had apparently
passed by, he knew that Cameron had been gone about ten minutes.

Time dragged on. A cow, unmilked, lowed plaintively once or twice.
A September night breeze set the dying leaves on the trees to
rustling, and stirred the dried ones about his feet. Pink's mind,
gradually reassured, turned to other things. He thought of Lily
Cardew, for one. Like Willy Cameron, he knew he would always love
her, but unlike Willy, the first pain of her loss was gone. He
was glad that time was over. He was glad that she was at home
again, safe from those - Some one was moving near him, passing
within twenty feet. Whoever it was was stepping cautiously but
blunderingly. It was not Cameron, then. He was a footfall only,
not even an outline. Before Pink could decide on a line of action,
the sound was lost.

Every sense acute, he waited. He had decided that if the incident
were repeated, he would make an effort to get the fellow from
behind, but there was no return. The wind had died again, and
there was no longer even the rustling of the leaves to break the
utter stillness.

Suddenly he saw a red flash near the barn, and an instant later
heard the report of a pistol. Came immediately after that a brief
fusillade of shots, a pause, then two or three scattering ones.

With the first shot Pink started running. He was vaguely conscious
of other steps near him, running also, but he could see nothing.
His whole mind was set on finding Willy Cameron. Alone he had not
a chance, but two of them together could put up a fight. He pelted
along, stumbling, recovering, stumbling again.

Another shot was fired. They hadn't got him yet, or they wouldn't
be shooting. He raised his voice in a great call.

He ran into a low fence then, and it threw him. He had hardly got
to his knees before the other running figure had hurled itself on
him, and struck him with the butt of a revolver. He dropped flat
and lay still.

* * * * *

For weeks Woslosky had known of the growing strength of the
Vigilance Committee, and that it was arming steadily.

It threatened absolutely the success of his plans. Even the
election of Akers and the changes he would make in the city police;
even the ruse of other strikes and machine-made riotings to call
away the state troops, - none of these, or all of them, would be
effectual against an organized body of citizens, duly called to
the emergency.

And such an organization was already effected. Within a week, when
the first card reached his hands, it had grown to respectable
proportions. Woslosky went to Doyle, and they made their
counter-moves quickly. No more violence. A seemingly real but
deceptive orderliness. They were dealing with inflammatory material,
however, and now and then it got out of hand. Unlike Doyle the
calculating, who made each move slowly and watched its results with
infinite zest, the Pole chafed under delay.

"We can't hold them much longer," he complained, bitterly. "This
thing of holding them off until after the election - and until
Akers takes office - it's got too many ifs in it."

"It was haste lost Seattle," said Doyle, as unmoved as Woslosky
was excited.

Woslosky did not like Louis Akers. What was more important, he
distrusted him. When he heard of his engagement to Lily Cardew
he warned Doyle about him.

"He's in this thing for what he can get out of it," he said. "He'll
go as far as he can, with safety, to be accepted by the Cardews."

"Exactly," was Doyle's dry comment, "with safety, you said. Well,
he knows you and he knows me, and he'll he straight because he's
afraid not to be."

But Doyle only smiled. He had known many women and loved none of
them, and he was temperamentally unable to understand the type
of man who saw the world through a woman's eyes and in them.

So Woslosky was compelled to watch the growth of Willy Cameron's
organization, and to hold in check the violent passions he had
himself roused, and to wait, gnawing his nails with inaction and
his heart with rage. But these certain things he discovered:

That the organization's growth was coincident with a new interest
in local politics, as though some vital force had wakened the
plain people to a sense of responsibility.

That a drug clerk named Cameron was the founder and moving spirit
of the league, and that he was, using Hendricks' candidacy as a
means, rousing the city to a burning patriotic activity that Mr.
Woslosky regarded as extremely pernicious.

And that this same Willy Cameron had apparently a knowledge of
certain plans, which was rather worse than pernicious. Mr.
Woslosky's name for it was damnable.

For instance, there were the lists of the various city stores and
their estimated contents, missing from Mr. Woslosky's own
inconspicuous trunk in a storage house. On that had been based
the plan for feeding the revolution, by the simple expedient of
exchanging by organized pillage the contents of the city stores
for food stuffs from the farmers in outlying districts.

Revolution, according to Mr. Woslosky, could only be starved out.
He had no anxiety as to troops which would be sent against them,
because he had a cynical belief that a man's country was less to
him than various other things, including his stomach. He believed
that all armies were riddled with sedition and fundamentally
opposed to law.

Copies of other important matters, too, were missing. Lists of
officials for the revolutionary city government and of deputies to
take the places of the disbanded police, plans for manning, by the
radicals, the city light, water and power plants; a schedule of
public eating houses to take the place of the restaurants.

Woslosky began to find this drug clerk with the ridiculous given
name getting on his nerves. He considered him a dangerous enemy
to progress, that particular form of progress which Mr. Woslosky
advocated, and he suspected him of a lack of ethics regarding
trunks in storage. Mr. Woslosky had the old-world idea that the
best government was a despotism tempered by assassination. He
thought considerably about Willy Cameron.

But the plan concerning the farm house was, in the end, devised by
Louis Akers. Woslosky was skeptical. It was true that Cameron
might stick his head into the lion's jaws, but precautions had been
known to be taken at such times to prevent their closing. However,
the Pole was desperate.

He took six picked men with him that afternoon to the farm, and
made a strategic survey of the situation. The house was closed
and locked, but he was not concerned with the house. Cusick had
told Denslow the meetings were held late at night in the barn,
and to the barn Woslosky repaired, sawed-off shotgun under his
coat and cigarette in mouth, and inspected it with his evil smile.
Two men, young and reckless, might easily plan to conceal
themselves under the hay in the loft, and -

Woslosky put down his gun and went down into the cow barn below,
whistling softly to himself. He began to enjoy the prospect. He
gathered some eggs from the feed boxes, carrying them in his hat,
and breaking the lock of the kitchen door he and his outfit looted
the closet there and had an early supper, being careful to
extinguish the fire afterwards.

Not until dusk was falling did he post his men, three outside among
the outbuildings, one as a sentry near the woods, and two in the
barn itself. He himself took up his station inside the barn door,
sitting on the floor with his gun across his knees. Looking out
from there, he saw the sharp flash of a hastily extinguished match,
and snarled with anger. He had forbidden smoking.

"I've got to go out," he said cautiously. "Don't you fools shoot
me when I come back."

Some five minutes later he came back, still noiselessly, and treading
like a cat. He could only locate the barn door by feeling for it,
and above the light scraping of his fingers he could hear, inside,
cautious footsteps over the board floor. He scowled again. Damn
this country quiet, anyhow! But he had found the doorway, and was
feeling his way through when he found himself caught and violently
thrown. The fall and the surprise stunned him. He lay still for
an infuriated helpless second, with a knee on his chest and both
arms tightly held, to hear one of his own men above him saying:

"But you came in a couple of minutes ago. Somebody came in. You
heard him, Cusick, didn't you?"

Woslosky whirled and closed and fastened the barn doors, and almost
with the same movement drew a searchlight and flashed it over the
place. It was apparently empty.

The Pole burst into blasphemous anger, punctuated with sharp
questions. Both men had heard the cautious entrance they had
taken for his own, both men had remained silent and unsuspicious,
and both were positive whoever had come in had not gone out again.

He stationed one man at the door, and commenced a merciless search.
The summer's hay filled one end, but it was closely packed below
and offered no refuge. Armed with the shotgun, and with the flash
in his pocket, Woslosky climbed the ladder to the loft, going
softly. He listened at the top, and then searched it with the
light, holding it far to the left for a possible bullet. The loft
was empty. He climbed into it and walked over it, gun in one hand
and flash in the other, searching for some buried figure. But there
was nothing. The loft was fragrant with the newly dried hay, sweet
and empty. Woslosky descended the ladder again, the flash
extinguished, and stood again on the barn floor, considering.
Cusick was a man without imagination, and he had sworn that some
one had come in. Then -

Suddenly there was a whirr of wings outside and above, excited
flutterings first, and then a general flight of the pigeons who
roosted on the roof. Woslosky listened and slowly smiled.

"We've got him, boys," he said, without excitement. "Outside, and
call the others. He's on the roof."

Cusick whistled shrilly, and as the Pole ran out he met the others
coming pell-mell toward him. He flung a guard of all five of them
around the barn, and himself walked off a hundred feet or so and
gazed upward. The very outline of the ridge pole was
indistinguishable, and he swore softly. In the hope of drawing an
answering flash he fired, but without result. The explosion echoed
and reechoed, died away.

He called to Cusick, and had him try the same experiment, following
the line of the gutter as nearly as possible in the darkness, on
that side, and emptying his revolver. Still silence.

Woslosky began to doubt. The pigeons might have seen his flashlight,
might have heard his own stealthy movements. He was intensely
irritated. The shooting, if the alarm had been false, had ruined
everything. He saw, as in a vision, Doyle's sneering face when he
told him. Beside him Cusick was reloading his revolver in the
darkness.

Then, out of the night, came a call from the direction of the woods,
and unintelligible at that distance.

Woslosky made no reply. He was listening. Some one was approaching,
now running, now stopping as though confused. Woslosky held his gun
ready, and waited. Then, from a distance, he heard his name called.

He stepped inside the door of the barn and showed the light for a
moment. Soon after the sentry floundered in, breathless and excited.

"I got one of them," he gasped. "Hit him with my gun. He's lying
back by the stone fence."

"He did. That's how I knew it wasn't one of our fellows. He called
Cameron, so he's the other one."

Woslosky drew a deep breath. Then it was Cameron on the roof. It
was Cameron they wanted.

"He'll sleep for an hour or two, if he ever wakes up," Pink's
assailant boasted. But Woslosky was taking no chances that night.
He sent two men after Pink, and began to pace the floor thoughtfully.
If he could have waited for daylight it would have been simple
enough, but he did not know how much time he had. He did not
underestimate young Cameron's intelligence, and it had occurred to
him that that young Scot might cannily have provided against his
failure to return. Then, too, the state constabulary had an
uncomfortable habit of riding lonely back roads at night, and shots
could be heard a long distance off.

He had never surveyed the barn roof closely, but he knew that it
was steeply pitched. Cameron, then, was probably braced somewhere
in the gutter. The departure of the two men had left him
short-handed, and he waited impatiently for their return. With a
ladder, provided it could be quietly placed, a man could shoot from
a corner along two sides of the roof. With two ladders, at diagonal
corners, they could get him. But a careful search discovered no
ladders on the place.

He went out, and standing close against the wall for protection,
called up.

"We know you're there, Cameron," he said. "If you come down we
won't hurt you. If you don't, we'll get you, and you know it."

Soon after that the two men carried in Pink Denslow, and laid him
on the floor of the barn. Then Woslosky tried again, more reckless
this time with anger. He stood out somewhat from the wall and
called:

He regained the barn and had his arm supported in an extemporized
sling. Then he ordered Pink to be tied, and fighting down his pain
considered the situation. Cameron was on the roof, and armed. Even
if he had no extra shells he still had five shots in reserve, and he
would not waste any of them. Whoever tried to scale the walls would
be done in at once; whoever attempted to follow him to the roof by
way of the loft would be shot instantly. And his own condition
demanded haste; the bullet, striking from above, had broken his arm.
Every movement was torture.

He thought of setting fire to the barn. Then Cameron would have
the choice of two things, to surrender or to be killed. He might
get some of them first, however. Well, that was a part of the game.

"I've just thought of something, Cameron," he called. "We're going
to fire the barn. Your young friend is here, tied, and we'll leave
him here. Do you get that? Either throw down that gun of yours,
and come down, or I'm inclined to think you'll be up against it.
I'll give you a minute or so to think it over."

At half-past eleven o'clock that night the first of four automobiles
drove into Friendship. It was driven by a hatless young man in a
raincoat over a suit of silk pajamas, and it contained four County
detectives and the city Chief of Police. Behind it, but well
outdistanced, came the other cars, some of them driven by leading
citizens in a state of considerable deshabille.

At a cross street in Friendship the lead car drew up, and flashlights
were turned on a road map in the rear of the car. There was some
argument over the proper road, and a member of the state constabulary,
riding up to investigate, showed a strong inclination to place them
under arrest.

He jerked his revolver free, dug his heels into the flanks of his
horse, and was off on a dead run. Half way up the hill the car
passed him, the black going hard, and its rider's face, under the
rim of his uniform hat, a stern profile. His reins lay loose on
the animal's neck, and he was examining his gun.

The road mounted to a summit, and dipped again. They were in a
long valley, and the burning barn was clearly outlined at the far
end of it. One side was already flaming, and tongues of fire
leaped out through the roof. The men in the car were standing now,
doors open, ready to leap, while the car lurched and swayed over
the uneven road. Behind them they heard the clatter of the oncoming
horse.

As they drew nearer they could see three watching figures against
the burning building, and as they turned into the lane which led to
the barnyard a shot rang out and one of the figures dropped and lay
still. There was a cry of warning from somewhere, and before the
detectives could leap from the car, the group had scattered, running
wildly. The state policeman threw his horse back on its hunches, and
fired without apparently taking aim at one of the running shadows.
The man threw up his arms and fell. The state policeman galloped
toward him, dismounted and bent over him.

Firing as they ran, detectives leaped out of the car and gave chase,
and so it was that the young gentleman in bedroom slippers and
pajamas, standing in his car and shielding his eyes against the
glare, saw a curious thing.

First of all, the roof blazed up brightly, and he perceived a human
figure, hanging by its hands from the eaves and preparing to drop.
The young gentleman in pajamas was feeling rather out of things by
that time, so he made a hasty exit from his car toward the barn,
losing a slipper as he did so, and yelling in a slightly hysterical
manner. It thus happened that he and the dropping figure reached
the same spot at almost the same moment, one result of which was that
the young gentleman in pajamas found himself struck a violent blow
with a doubled-up fist, and at the same moment his bare right foot
was tramped on with extreme thoroughness.

The young gentleman in pajamas reeled back dizzily and gave tongue,
while standing on one foot. The person he addressed was the state
constable, and his instructions were to get the fugitive and kill
him. But the fugitive here did a very. strange thing. Through
the handkerchief which it was now seen he wore tied over his mouth,
he told the running policeman to go to perdition, and then with
seeming suicidal intent rushed into the burning barn. From it he
emerged a moment later, dragging a figure bound hand and foot,
blackened with smoke, and with its clothing smoldering in a dozen
places; a figure which alternately coughed and swore in a strangled
whisper, but which found breath for a loud whoop almost immediately
after, on its being immersed, as it promptly was, in a nearby
horse-trough.

Very soon after that the other cars arrived. They drew up and men
emerged from them, variously clothed and even more variously armed,
but all they saw was the ruined embers of the barn, and in the glow
five figures. Of the five one lay, face up to the sky, as though
the prostrate body followed with its eyes the unkillable traitor
soul of one Cusick, lately storekeeper at Friendship. Woslosky,
wounded for the second time, lay on an automobile rug on the ground,
conscious but sullenly silent. On the driving seat of an automobile
sat a young gentleman with an overcoat over a pair of silk pajamas,
carefully inspecting the toes of his right foot by the light of a
match, while another young gentleman with a white handkerchief
around his head was sitting on the running board of the same car,
dripping water and rather dazedly staring at the ruins.

And beside him stood a gaunt figure, blackened of face, minus
eyebrows and charred of hair, and considerably torn as to clothing.
A figure which seemed disinclined to talk, and which gave its
explanations in short, staccato sentences. Having done which, it
relapsed into uncompromising silence again.

Some time later the detectives returned. They had made no further
captures, for the refugees had known the country, and once outside
the light from the burning barn search was useless. The Chief of
Police approached Willy Cameron and stood before him, eyeing him
severely.

"The next time you try to raid an anarchist meeting, Cameron," he
said, "you'd better honor me with your confidence. You've probably
learned a lesson from all this."

Willy Cameron glanced at him, and for the first time that night,
smiled.

"I have," he said; "I'll never trust a pigeon again." The Chief
thought him slightly unhinged by the night's experience.